Adventures in Austenland
Being a forthright though often jocular account of how an obsession with Pride and Prejudice led to writing a book, a screenplay, and filming and premiering a movie
COLIN FIRTH AS MR. DARCY
My little brother was assigned the novel in his high school English class, and after a few pages he was ready to quit.
“Why do they keep worrying about getting married? What is a clergy? What is even happening?” My friend had been recommending the new miniseries, and I thought, maybe if my brother watched an episode, he’d be able to visualize the characters and world and have an easier time comprehending the book.
So on an unsuspecting Saturday, I borrowed the six VHS tapes and settled into my parents’ basement with my teenage brother and my boyfriend, Dean.
Something happened as I watched Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.
Something . . . primal. I’d never been particularly crush prone.
As a preteen, I didn’t tape up posters of boy bands or call Corey Haim’s 1-900 line.
But there I was, a mature twenty-three-year-old, sitting between my brother and my boyfriend, trying to pretend that my neck wasn’t hot and flushed and my stomach wasn’t doing flip-flops.
After the first tape they were done, but I was like, I think I’ll just stay here by myself and watch a little more? And maybe just all of it?
I was plagued by Darcy-mania for days. I rewatched certain parts. I reread the book. I dreamed and daydreamed. It was intoxicating but awfully inconvenient, since Colin Firth isn’t actually Mr. Darcy and Mr. Darcy doesn’t exist, and even if he did he’d have died two centuries ago.
A couple of years later, I’d just moved to a new state for grad school, and that first Saturday night found me alone browsing the aisles of a video store (which used to be a thing, I swear).
I was looking for something to take the edge off my loneliness.
There it was, Pride and Prejudice. I made a rookie mistake: I only rented the first two VHS tapes.
That night, after finishing the tapes, I was immediately overtaken by a gnawing despair.
The store was now closed until Monday! How could I last?
I found my reaction extraordinary, incomprehensible, and hilarious.
This story wasn’t new to me. I knew what happened next.
So how could it still be so compelling that I was fitful until I could finish it?
THERE’S A NOVEL IN HERE SOMEWHERE
Some of my friends were also suffering from my same affliction.
In regular conversation, we’d begun saying “Make haste!” and “That’s a fine prospect”—you know, like cool kids.
We were all Austen book fans, but for me, the miniseries transformed the story from a witty, delightful comedy into a cloying, relentless fantasy.
One friend declared she had given up on dating entirely because “no one measures up to Mr. Darcy.” We knew we were ridiculous, but reality was just so sad and dismal, with no hope of balls, corsets, walks around the park, and accidental meetings behind the currant bush.
It couldn’t have been that great to live in Austen’s time—could it?
As I fantasized about how one could slip into an Austen novel to try it on and see how it fit, I began to invent an English estate where people like me could go on vacation, put on the clothes, and interact with actors pretending to be your witty Regency aunt or dashing Regency suitor.
I grew up doing school and community theater, and in college, my group of theater friends used to create complex, immersive party games where we’d come as a character and create an unscripted story.
It would be like that! But . . . Austenian!
I longed to write it. But working on my MFA in creative writing, I felt more aware than ever of my limited skill.
If only I could make sentences do what I wanted them to, maybe I could be worthy of exploring this story.
In 2000, Dean (the boyfriend on the couch) became my husband, and I talked to him about my Austenland idea.
Dean, who doesn’t see a point to realism in stories, said, “You could make the actors in Austenland robots—you know, like in Westworld.”
I wasn’t familiar with Westworld (this was long before the TV series), so he rented the 1973 film based on Crichton’s novel.
Again we were sharing a couch, watching a video, but somehow Yul Brynner as a killer robot didn’t have the same effect on me as Colin Firth in breeches.
After the robots had murdered everyone dead and the credits started to roll, my husband said, “See? You could do it like that!”
It wasn’t quite what I had in mind.
But what I did have in mind slowly began to form into full color and palpable dimensions.
I wrote a slim first draft titled “Ostensibly Jane,” expanding on it between my work on other books.
As I revised, almost everything in that first draft changed as what I wanted from the story changed, including the main character and the ending.
But years later, I finally had something I felt was worth sharing.
It’s always been my belief that writers only do 50 percent of the work.
The reader does the other 50 percent, bringing to the story their own experiences—what they’ve seen and heard and smelled and felt.
Even their present mood and current environment affects how they imagine the story into being.
Writers never get to experience the versions that are created inside readers’ heads.
Unlike musicians and performing artists, we don’t even get the chance to be present when people are engaging with our art.
Writers basically work in dark caves and throw our works out the cave opening, never sure if they will collide with a person’s head or land in a mud pool and slowly turn into sludge.
Unless the writer lives with a reader. Like my husband.
Dean was my first reader. When he started to read my current draft at night before bed, I’d “read” a different book next to him, but really I was spying on him: Is his focus wandering? Does that mean he’s bored? OH NO HE’S BORED IT’S TERRIBLE IT’S TRASH I SHOULD GIVE UP WRITING!!!
If he showed any reaction at all—the merest twitch of his lips—I’d ask, “What part are you on? Do you think it’s funny? What do you think is going to happen next???” How pleasant it must be to read a book while the author sits there, staring like a carrion crow, hungry for your tiniest reaction.
UNEXPECTED AUDIENCE REACTIONS
Seven years after I began writing the book, Austenland was published.
It’s a bizarre experience when a story that you’ve worked on in private, that you scoured over again and again for the perfect words, that has only been read by a handful of people, suddenly is out for everyone to behold. Today! It’s here! It’s a . . . BOOK!
And then . . . what? There’s no opening night audience to applaud or boo.
There’s no immediate reaction at all. So you wait.
Desperately. To hear anything. For days, for weeks.
Do they love it? Do they hate it? Was it worth it?
Is anyone even reading it? Does the book even exist?
DO I EVEN EXIST? DOES LIFE HAVE ANY MEANING WHATSOEVER? ??
Eventually, I began to receive emails from readers. One remains my favorite reader letter I’ve ever received. It was from a cloistered nun, who told me after she read the book, she recommended it to her fellow Poor Clare sisters, and it had been passed all around their monastery. She explained:
Even though we are espoused to Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Perfect Man, we, too, have a crush on Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.
The nuns? They loved it. But lest you worry that I was ever in danger of growing a big head, here’s another reader letter I received around the same time. I adore this one, too, though for different reasons:
I just read Austenland and was so disappointed.
I loved your other books and had come to trust you to keep things clean.
I bought Austenland for my teenaged daughter because she is a huge Pride and Prejudice fan.
I’m glad I decided to read it first, because it would have totally traumatized her.
I buried it in my kitchen trash can under a pile of wilted celery, where it should feel right at home.
How is the same book delightful to cloistered nuns but immoral garbage to a mom of a teenager?
Happily, by then I’d published several other books and was accustomed to inevitable negative reactions, so whenever the criticisms came I just took them in stride .
. . and only cried a little bit. For, like, three days, tops.
“THE SCRIPT, THE SCRIPT, AND THE SCRIPT”
A few years after publication, I got a call from one of my sister’s old friends who knew the screenwriter Jerusha Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre) and wanted to make an introduction.
I, a consummate weirdo and anxiety-ridden oft-recluse, didn’t return the call.
He left a few more messages, and weeks later, when I finally felt so ashamed of myself for ignoring him, I called back.
Relieved to get voicemail, I left him a message: Thank you but I don’t do private meets, and if it’s a film inquiry you can go through my film agent.
He called me back immediately and explained that Jerusha had read some of my young adult fantasy novels and, learning that I also lived in Utah, just wanted to take me to lunch as a fellow writer.
I think in Hollywood “taking lunches” is as common as sunny-smoggy days, but to a baby writer like me, this was very odd.
But I like lunch. And despite my reclusive weirdness, I like people. So I agreed.